When former president Donald Trump was found guilty of fraudulent business practices in a New York court and ordered to pay penalties to the tune of $355 to $450 million, some of us could hear the voice of Walt Whitman over 150 years ago pronouncing that the “depravity of the businesses classes in our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.”
It’s not just the former president, of course. It’s the big businesses that understand him and act like him and support the so-called conservative political party that he has come to represent, lock, stock, and barrel. Walt Whitman called it “scoundrelism,” an epidemic of cheap shots, double dealing and slick deception. As Walt wrote in his 1871 essay Democratic Vistas, “we had best look at our times … searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.”
A good place to start the search is with the immensely profitable financial smoke and mirrors that have, over the years, enriched the American insurance industry. Insurers have a long history of investing in both fossil fuels and cigarette manufacturing, both of which create risky, dangerous conditions that require insurance protection.
It works something like this. American insurance companies profit handsomely from their investment in the tobacco industry, and they also profit from charging smokers outrageous prices for insuring them against the very illnesses that tobacco causes. As the New England Journal of Medicine puts it, “insurers profit – and smokers lose—twice over.” Those profits are pretty much assured because cigarette companies genetically engineer tobacco so it has much more nicotine and becomes ferociously more addictive, according to truthinitiative.org. The tobacco industry has a genius for PR too, from the Marlboro Man to images of distinguished white-coat doctors smoking Camels, to every movie star in virtually every film since talkies portrayed as a chain-smoker until the mid-1960s. So, insurer investments have also supported Big Tobacco’s model campaigns of disinformation and denial that have been used with undeniable success by yet another insurer investment opportunity, the fossil fuel industry.
Insurance companies investing heavily in oil and gas help to fund tricky but persuasive PR campaigns denying any links between the use of fossil fuels and climate change. Business Insurance magazine reported last year that insurers have “over half a trillion” dollars invested in fossil fuels. There is “probably no industry that is more connected to the impact from and the impact to climate than insurance,” according to market analysist Stephen Rothstein. The industry includes giants such as New York Life, Mass Mutual, State Farm, Berkshire Hathaway and Prudential, all heavy fossil fuel investors. Far from being damaged by climate change, insurance companies, flush with lavish oil and gas profits, have found a way to have their cake and eat it too on the backs of helpless consumers.
In 2017, Harvard research fellow in the history of science, Goeffrey Supran, was quoted in the Harvard Gazette as saying that America’s biggest oil company and climate-change denier, ExxonMobil, had “misled the public about basic climate science.” It did so by “contributing quietly to climate science, and loudly to promoting doubt about that science.” It doesn’t seem far fetched to suppose that Exxon’s big investors must have known about its deceptive PR practices. The company has a “long history of attacking science and scientists in order to undermine and delay climate action.” In fact, Supran said that, “behind closed doors and in academic circles, Exxon has known that its products would likely cause dangerous global warming since at least the 1970s.”
Walt Whitman’s accusations of “scoundralism” and “depravity of the business classes” would seem to apply precisely to insurance companies profitting from investments in climate-change denying big oil companies while dramatically raising home insurance rates in climate-change vulnerable environments, or cutting their loses by refusing to sell homeowner insurance in such environments at all.
In a recent issue of High Country News, former California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones was quoted as saying that “collectively” insurance companies are investing about $536 billion in the oil and gas industry while “also insuring oil and gas infrastructure.” It may seem, as Jones says, that insurers are “investing in the very sector that’s resulting in … (their )demise and their inability to write insurance in certain geographies,” but the profits they are making from climate change and the companies that help cause it are too vast to pass up even if they require tricks of conscience foreign to the rest of us.
Walt was right. “In business (this all devouring modern word business), the one sole object is, by any means (emphasis mine), pecuniary gain….” In other words, it’s a scam all the way down.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
I find it extraordinary and dispiriting that this has become the norm for big business in our country: causing or encouraging ills and then profiting outrageously from them. Rare exceptions to the rule demonstrate that this doesn’t have to be the case. I wonder why more Americans don’t simply boycott those who use us in this way? We could force them to reform, but we don’t. Thank you once again, V. B., for telling it like it is.
I suspect that founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson would have been seriously disappointed that corporations have been able to run amok over the rest of society. Since there is a process in place to control corporations – the requirement that states must approve applications to establish corporations – there could have been requirements for corporations to be more civic-minded. That didn’t happen, but I wonder if that could ever be changed. It certainly would be difficult, since the rules vary from state to state.